Ever since Emma started kindergarten I’ve been getting at least one school identification form home on the first day of school; the second at the very latest. I immediately read through, checking phone numbers and email addresses, ticking off permission for them to take neighbourhood walks, and pondering whether we actually live close enough to a nuclear power plant to tick the potassium iodine tablet section. I check it off just in case… better to be safe than sorry. Even if we’re all glowing, at least they’ll have less chance of cancer.
Jeremy came home on the first day of school this year and I promptly checked zir backpack. No form. Same with the second, third, and fourth day. I was just about to write a note to zir teacher asking if it had gone missing when zie got suspended. I got the form a few days after zie returned. By then I wasn’t worried about sitting right down to proofread it, figuring if they wanted it back promptly they’d have given it to me the first week.
I filled it at the end of September so you can imagine my surprise when Jeremy informed me zir teacher wanted me to look around the apartment for zir form.
“Wait, I gave that to you over a month ago,” I blurted. Zie sighed and shook zir head.
“I told my teacher ages ago that I lost it on the way to school but she won’t believe me. She keeps saying it’s an official school document and she can’t just go print out a new copy.”
“Well, it’s not around here,” I replied. “If it was we’d have found it. I’ll write a note saying I can’t find it and that you lost it in transit.”
Emma, Mark, and I were talking in the living room this evening when I looked down at a sheet of paper. It was Jeremy’s school identification form. I have no idea where it came from, at this point you could blame aliens and I’d almost believe you. My apartment isn’t the cleanest place on the planet but we’re far from candidates for an episode on Hoarders and it was sitting right there in the middle of the floor.
Also it’s a good thing I never wrote that letter to the teacher.
I gave the form a quick scan then looked once again at the gender marker. X was already typed into the male section, the only other option was female. I glanced over at Jeremy and wrote in another X…
Emma peered over my shoulder. “Shouldn’t you write something down?” she asked. “What if they think you just marked it by accident?”
I thought about writing down bigender then circled male/female instead. She nodded her approval.
There’s a good chance the school board will have me fill in a new copy or simply change the marker back to M but it was worth it just to see the expression on Jeremy’s face when zie saw what I’d done.
Because I'm Fabulous 
That’s exactly how my daughter’s form looks, too!
*fingers crossed* maybe they’ll let it stay like that.
Basically, what our principal told us was that the form could stay that way – because it was kind of irrelevant. But we had to “pick one” for the computer. But our daughter got to see the form being filled out, and I know that was important for her….and now I’m realizing why the secretary who witnessed that is probably misgendering my daughter. Oh lord. I came in to change the gender, but my daughter wanted both, so after I asked for it to be changed to girl, my daughter also circled boy…which the secretary interpreted as me somehow forcing this on my daughter. Ugh. Sigh.
It’s never easy.
I did almost the same recently, though instead of circling I wrote in “neither/inapplicable” (a Humane Society application, my gender really was irrelevant). You could write in “Yes to both” or similar, for Jeremy. Paper forms are nice like that.
As a child if I could get my hands on such forms I would completely black out the entire space for the gender/sex question with so much hard pressure that I generally tore the paper and often broke my pencil. I was always severely punished for it, but no one ever questioned why I did it. Not asked of me of course because I didn’t speak and thus had no mind and didn’t matter. But. In retrospect it seems obvious.
Good for you! You never know. It just might make the point.
I hope so. That would be good.